Tomáš Pospíšek's Notizblock
Goal: make a screencast
Found a good site, that describes available options. Chose gtk-recordmydesktop and did a screencast.
Went on to cut the screencast.
Tried openmovieeditor 0.20080102-2.1build1.1. OME doesn't handle Ogg Video well however: it complains a lot about not found frame beginnings. Thus I transformed the Ogg video into AVI with:
mencoder out.ogv -nosound -o out.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc
however that did not copy the sound. Never mind, because when playing out.avi in OME it only displays every full frame or so, which makes the editor unusable for video editing.
Went on to cinelerra. Playing the ogv file would only show a small cutout of the originally recorded screencast. I spent an hour or so to find out how to change that. During this time cinerella managed to crash once and to hang itself with 100% CPU a few times. When trying to put the marker somewhere at the end of the recording, cinerella would not be able to find a frame to start from, thus it would only play sound...
But even mplayer would complain about some stuff not right with the file.
Only vlc seemed to play the OGV file cleanly.
My takeaway from this is:
- cinelerra is not stable and unintuitive to use (Gimp for video)
- openmovieeditor is not really usable yet for non hackers
- Ubuntu is featuring a "ubuntustudio-video" package that contains as far as I was able to tell software in pre-alpha state and does not track upstream very hard
- OGV seems to be a format that is not well supported even in OSS
So I went back to the command line once again and after much trying and asking the online oracles I found the maging mencoder incantations:
It must be good to have a Mac.
Tomáš Pospíšek, 2009-04-09